A Stranger calls to see me
by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne). November 1850. Steel etching. Illustration for
chapter 63, "A Visitor," in Charles Dickens's David
Copperfield. Source: Centenary Edition (1911), volume two. Image scan
and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Commentary

The second illustration for the nineteenth (double) monthly
number, issued in November 1850, completes the story of Dan'l Peggotty, his
niece, and those who accompanied them to Australia. For this second November
illustration, the illustrator shows a mature David Copperfield, his middle age
made obvious by his receding hairline, seated before a domestic hearth with his
second wife Agnes seated beside him, his children playing happily with numerous
toys, and his first wife, Dora, presiding over the scene from the painting above
the mantelpiece. According to J. A. Hammerton (1910), this illustration of well
deserved domestic bliss may be associated with the following passage:

Little Agnes ran to bring the old man in, and my wife cried out to
me that it was Mr. Peggotty! [Hammerton, 366]

In fact, Hammerton has collapsed the passage that Phiz, likely
prompted by Dickens, has utilized to demonstrate that the highly moral couple,
David and Agnes, are enjoying the benefits of spousal companionship and family
that fate has denied to Em'ly, still a single woman in Port Middlebay,
Australia, tending her uncle's home:

There soon appeared, pausing in the dark doorway as he [520/521]
entered, a hale, grey-haired old man. Little Agnes, attracted by his looks,
had run to bring him in, and I had not yet clearly seen his face, when my wife,
starting up, cried out to me, in a pleased and agitated voice, that it was Mr.
Peggotty!

The pleasant domestic scene, with the husband and wife keeping
company with "three of [their] children" (a turn of phrase implying that David
and Agnes by the tenth year of their marriage have had more than that number of
offspring) is reminiscent of pictures in the popular press (notably, The Illustrated London News) of the royal couple and their
numerous progeny at mid-century. If we assume that the date of Dan'l Peggotty's
London visit is the spring of 1850, the time of this instalment's publication,
then David and Agnes Copperfield would have married about the same year as
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (1840). The royal couple eventually had nine
children in total, and certainly by mid-century had seven children.

In the final illustration in the narrative-pictorial sequence, and
discounting the ornamental title-page and frontispiece as flashbacks, the story
essentially comes to closure with respect to the David-Agnes romance. The boy
who had nothing but the rags on his back as he approached Dover is now a
comfortably circumstanced middle-class parent of a growing family, a benign
Victorian pater familias in contrast to the despotic stepfather who
killed his mother with unkindness. Testifying to the source of his wealth and
respectability, books lie strewn across the floor, as if (however unlikely)
these have been the playthings of the Copperfield children, the building blocks
of cognition and sensibility, so to speak, analogous to the physical building
blocks with which little Agnes has been playing. Since another few years will
pass in the succeeding chapters before we arrive, so to speak, at the present,
the year 1850, we may assume this domestic scene and reunion with Dan'l
Peggotty occur in the mid-1840s, when both Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria
had growing families: while Dickens's oldest child was a boy (Charles Dickens,
Junior, born 6 January 1837), the Queen's oldest child was Victoria, the
Princess Royal, born in 1840, and was therefore about five years of age (roughly
the same age as the child named for after her mother, Kate Dickens, born 31
January 1839) when the scene is set chronologically. Interesting but by sheer
coincidence, both couples, Charles and Catherine Dickens and Victoria and
Albert, each had nine children survive infancy. There are certain similarities
between this picture of the Copperfield family and that of the Royal family in
The Illustrated London News in the 12 October 1844
issue: "The Crimson Drawing-room:
— Introduction of Louis Philippe to the Infant Royal Family" (page
233).

The drawing-room of this final scene in Phiz's narrative-pictorial sequence
bears certain points of resemblance to that other Copperfield drawing-room scene
by Phiz, "My child-wife's old companion", even though the
house in which David and Agnes reside is located in London rather than on the
outskirts of the metropolis, in Highgate, where David and Dora lived. The same
clock, indicative of the passage of time and its effects on the characters, sits
on the mantelpiece, and Dora's picture looks down up David, whom she has
bequeathed in both scenes to the more intellectually able Agnes. As Jane Rabb
Cohen notes,

After Agnes and David are married, the same portrait, hanging
between the two sculptured angels, and next to it apparently a drawing of
Em'ly before her Yarmouth boat home, recall the turbulent past that made the
present idyllic scene possible . . . .[105]

One should add, as Phiz's including so many books again in David's domestic
situation implies, that the present idyllic scene is also made possible by the
fruits of David's imagination, so that, in a sense, the scene contains two
varieties of Copperfield children. The scene to the right of the fireplace,
then, corresponds with the title-page vignette, while the picture to the left
appears to be an old house, possibly the Blunderstone Rookery, which in a
different view is the subject of the frontispiece. The angels whose presence
Cohen notes do not in fact represent the twin angels of David's life, Dora and
Agnes, since one (right) is clearly male, so that the logical construction to
place upon the sculptures is that they are analogues for the destined couple
themselves. The picture of Dora is unchanged since "My
child-wife's old companion", although less dark and therefore more easily
discerned in its details; since the posture and the off-the-shoulder dress are
the same, one is tempted to note that, whereas Agnes was wearing a more modest
dress suitable to the gloomy mood in the earlier plate (in which she is about to
announce Dora's death), now Agnes is wearing a dress in precisely the same
fashion, a subtle suggestion that she has replaced Dora in David's life. Daniel
Peggotty, a respectable dressed, affluent, old farmer, seems to have aged dramatically
since his last appearances (in "The Emigrants" and
"Mr. Peggotty's dream comes true"), and the wild-haired
Copperfield boys resemble the Micawber twins in "Restoration
of mutual confidence between Mr. and Mrs. Micawber". A significant
difference is the size of the chairs in each drawing-room scene, for whereas
David's chair is much larger than Dora's armless chair (identified by the guitar
and music folio leaning against it) in the former scene, in the latter scene
David and Agnes occupy chairs of similar size and design, suggesting their
intellectual and moral equality. Nevertheless, in terms of composition, one
chair has its back to the viewer in each scene; however, while that chair is
vacant in the former scene, in the latter it is occupied by David (once again
shown in in profile), who formerly was wrapped up in his melancholy thoughts of
the ailing Dora but now turns away from the fire to welcome Mr. Peggotty.
Although Fred Barnard also provides an illustration for ch. 63 in the Household
Edition of the novel, the "stranger" is not in fact Mr. Peggotty; rather, the
Barnard plate realizes a moment in the sixty-fourth chapter, when Mr. Dick
fashions and flies kites for David's boys in the summertime.